In "Quiet Veronica" it is bestial, in "The Perfecting of a Love" it is profligate. "Grigia" and "Tonka" are variants of the medieval pastourelle— the seduction, in "Grigia," of a peasant girl by a man of higher social class, and in "Tonka" of a shopgirl by a student; but in either case the sexual situation is a figure for what is beyond sex. To study the behavior of people in love is, for Musil, to study the human situation at its quick. Even when there is only delighted animality, or when, as in "Tonka," there is an avowed absence of love and of intellectual communion, in a milieu of poverty and disease, sex remains the central ground for Musil's study of the potentialities of human consciousness.

The earliest of these stories is "The Temptation of Quiet Veronica," which appeared in an earlier and very different version as "The Enchanted House" in 1908. One's first thought is to relate this story, in its later form, to the literature of the Decadence; but its opaque surface, and the erotic feeling which occasionally pierces it, reflect Musil's preoccupation with the penetrating of reality by consciousness under the stimulus of sex. In short, it is not a failed attempt at the literature of neurasthenia, but a perhaps overworked statement of what we have seen to be Musil's principal theme. What we remember is not the pathology but Veronica's sense of her own body as she undresses, and Johannes, on the point of suicide, sensing himself as somehow rooted in the randomness of life. "The Perfecting of a Love" has a stronger and more visible story, and again there is a touch of romantic agonizing—"voluptuous enervated horror... nameless sin." But there is also much to distinguish it from run-of-the-mill decadence: the sharp picture of the amber twist issuing from a teapot on the first page; the detached view of Claudine dressing ("all her movements took on something of oafishly sensual affectation"); the sexuality of the stranger, which causes "a scarcely perceptible displacement of the surrounding world." Finally sex, represented as a defense against the "horribly gaping contingency of all one does," achieves a low and commonplace realization in the hotel cut off by snow; and from a body disagreeably swelling with lust emerges an image of love and union. "The Perfecting of a Love" cost Musil more nervous effort than any other work, and it is curiously central to his achievement. It is entirely lacking in the worldly irony and the "essayism" with which, in the great novel, he tried to relate its themes to the whole surface of modern life; but it is for all that a work which, in its uncommunicative, oblique fashion, expresses an understanding of human capacity, an intelligent and modern creativeness, comparable with those displayed in the contemporary writings of Lawrence and Thomas Mann.

By the time Three Women was published, thirteen years later, Musil had given up this somewhat hermetic manner, though he had not, as yet, developed the ironical discursiveness of The Man Without Qualities. Standing between his early and late manners, this book nevertheless has the same preoccupation with the erotic metamorphosis of consciousness and might also have been called Unions. The difference from the earlier work could be expressed as a new willingness to find a place in his stories for straight narrative (the "low, atavistic" element in fiction which Forster comically deplored and which troubles most experimental novelists). Not that this simpler form of satisfaction has the effect of making the stories simple, considered as a whole. They are still parables, and still, in the manner of parables, refuse to submit themselves to any single interpretation. In "Grigia," Homo is distinguished from the peasant community by his association with urban technology as well as urban civility; there is a futile rape of the land as well as easy seduction of women. Homo rediscovers the pleasant animality of sex, and with it a love for his absent wife and perhaps even for death. The climax of the tale has an insoluble ambiguity; but it is worth noting that ambiguity is a property not only of the narrative but also of the texture of the book. There are many passages of strange resonant poetry, for instance the description of behavior of hay when used as a love-bed. "Grigia" has the obliquity of high intelligence and idiosyncratic creativity. So too has "The Lady from Portugal," though its parable announces itself more clearly because its elements —love and union, spirituality and sickness—are placed at a great historical distance. And if "Tonka" is the best of all the stories, it is so not in virtue of its more down-to-earth theme, but be- causes one senses in it a stricter relation between the narrative and the texture.

The story of "Tonka" seems almost commonplace beside the others, but that is only because of its superficial resemblance to the stories of Zola or the De Goncourts or George Moore. It treats of the quasi-mystical aspects of sex in the least promising of relationships. The liaison is of apparently low power; there is nothing involved that can be called love, indeed there is hardly any discernible communication between the pair. On the other hand there is a curious lack of amorous or spiritual self-aggrandizement, there is goodness and nature. Above all there is guilt, but even guilt somehow escapes the conventional categories and remains as it were unattached to real personalities. When Shakespeare's Cressida was unfaithful, Troilus could not believe his senses: "This is and is not Cressida." In the same situation Tonka steadfastly is Tonka, the "nobly natural" shopgirl who has nevertheless quite certainly been unfaithful. These ambiguities reflect the ambiguities of human reality; Musil once wrote that he saw no reason in the world why something cannot be simultaneously true and false, and the way to express this unphilosophical view of the world is by making fictions. As Tonka's lover notices when he debates with himself the question of marrying or leaving her, the world is as a man makes it with his fictions; abolish them and it falls apart into a disgusting jumble.

All these stories have obvious autobiographical elements, roots in Musil's personal life; but much more important is their truth to his extraordinarily intelligent and creative mind. They are elaborate attempts to use fiction for its true purposes, the discovery and registration of the human world. As with all works of genius, they suggest a map of reality with an orientation at first strange and unfamiliar. And though it is true that the experience of The Man Without Qualities is one involving a more permanent change of consciousness in the reader, these works also require his serious attention.